More on my fiction writing

July 07, 2011

Peak Crazy

If you missed the news, the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is being built in China as modules to be assembled in California. Fourteen million Americans are officially unemployed and the U-6 (real) rate of unemployment in the Golden State is 22 percent. The project is, according to the New York Times, "part of China’s continual move up the global economic value chain — from cheap toys to Apple iPads to commercial jetliners — as it aims to become the world’s civil engineer." The original Bay Bridge was built during the Great Depression by Americans, employing thousands and, along with other infrastructure investments of the era, stimulating numerous American industries. We used to do these things and do them well. But no more. We buy plastic tubs from China at Wal-Mart to fill with other stuff we buy from China at Wal-Mart while working, if we're lucky, at stagnant- or low-wage jobs. We're crazy.

The last space shuttle mission is scheduled to begin Friday. After that, we cede space low-earth orbit to the Russians, who I guess won the space race after all, and more important exploration to China and India. In my lifetime, we put men on the moon, not because it was easy but because it was hard. NASA has been neglected since the Nixon administration, with the inadequate shuttles our only manned program. Now, nothing. We're told the private sector will take over. And it will do this...how? Why? Corporate America is sitting on its profits, not hiring Americans, not investing in America. I don't doubt some or another space boondoggle using federal corporate welfare, but Boeing is not going to take us to Mars. Where's the profit margin? We once did great things. Now we're crazy.

The Republicans are playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun on the debt ceiling. President Hoover is busy, as usual, negotiating against himself, begging for a few hundred billion in tax hikes while conceding trillions in budget cuts. These will only slow the economy at a time when the federal government should be aggressively investing in infrastructure (and not "roads and bridges"). Last I checked, Mr. Hoover has put Social Security on the table. Who needs John Boehner when the nominally Democratic president will give the social compact the coup de grace by himself. The nation sits cow-like as this transpires. The richest nation in history is "broke," we're told. Taxes can't be raised. It would hurt those precious "job creators," even though the Bush/Obama tax cuts have been an abysmal, demonstrable failure. Average Americans vote to protect the interests of the oligarchs. How else to explain it but...crazy.

Human-caused climate change continues apace. It's happening now. We're doing nothing to slow it, reverse it, or even prepare for it. After all, Fox "News," the Father Coughlins of modern talk radio and "researchers" sucking at the money teet of the fossil fuels industry say it's a hoax. Don't worry, be happy. Only a crazy nation would ignore this existential threat. Similarly, the suburban, car-dependent American world is about to run head-on at top speed into the reality of peak oil. Yet we've abandoned high-speed rail as House Republicans try to kill Amtrak and local transit systems struggle. A poll shows that a single-family tract "home" in the middle of nowhere is still The American Dream. Externalities be damned. Who would think this way? Crazy people.

Almost every news story I read is more confirmation of our national madness. And corruption, whether of institutions or the elite individuals who move from being regulators to highly-paid execs in banking, and back again. A historian or journalist is always careful about saying thus-and-such is unprecedented. But, can you think of another time in our history when this was happening? When William Howard Taft followed Theodore Roosevelt and abandoned progressive principles, the result was his defeat in 1912 and the beginning of a new progressive era. The follies of the Coolidge-Hoover years sent the Republicans into the wilderness completely for 16 years and discredited reactionary/moneyed politics for generations. Now the reality of what just happened to us was twisted into an anti-history almost immediately after the fact and the reactionaries are back in power.

Koreyel posted that we have a long way to go before we hit Peak Crazy, and it seems so. But if we employ the term as its used in petroleum engineering, peak merely means we've used up half of the commodity and the other half will be much more difficult and costly to reach and refine. The amazing thing about American Crazy is that it is truly renewable. But it does not operate in a vacuum. Soon, very soon, it will collide with reality. The result, I fear, will not be national renewal.

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I know a successful businessman who's friendly, decent, responsible, and oddly possessed. He hopes the Republicans shut down the government and midwife the Randian apotheosis. He's a winner and he's tired of losers whining instead of working hard. He wants America back to its virtuous high point (say, 1890) when nobody expected anything but what they could wrest from the sweat of their brow and the skin on their hands.

It's probably a given that just about all of us think we're not the problem. We identify and stereotype those that are and these scapegoats usually make us feel better for being so unlike ourselves. For myself, these people tend to be the "hard cases" who generally locate solutions to social problems in their cruel imagination. Say, forcing an unwed mother to pick cotton, or meting out the death penalty for drunk driving, or letting the luckless die for want of health care.

These people have always been around. My own father was like this, particularly in his later years. And they have finally found the sweet spot in American politics where "getting tough" is now the accepted answer to everything. Of course, it's not the answer to your thing because you're good. It's the "others" who are always the problem.

And they are, often as not, correct. I see people who think thuggishness is cool. I see them on light rail braying in full voice about "whupping that mofo's sorry ass". I see others who have such minimal self-control that they're clinically obese. Then there are those who think the answer to low self-esteem is another tattoo or piercing. Please grow up, I pray silently.

The craziness in this country is teased and tweaked for audience share. Talk-radio blowhards are expert Pavlovians, coaxing their frazzled listeners to ever-greater rages for the sake of tribal solidarity. And one political party is so inebriated in the certitude of righteous anger that it's willing to blow the nation up if it doesn't get its way. This is life imitating a Clint Eastwood movie not for any better reason than it feels like a therapeutic catharsis.

I listen to my neighbors talking about the debt-ceiling crisis and I get that the right's talking points have once again carried the day. "Why can't the government live within its means like we do?" I nod and realize that there's no inoculation against the grand simplifications of political hucksters. They're unassailable for being so dumbed down. And it's frightening to think these politicians believe their own bullshit. I'm not even sure there's a difference any longer between our nightmares and the harsh light of day. We are crossing over.

Since a lost decade is now baked in, people should have a fun time "living within their means". If the pain is not enough for a wakeup call why stop here? I still think Obama should have let the tax cuts expire, double dip be damned. If the US is in for a long valley of tears, spread the pain and do it right.

Fun fact for Jon: Rep Mica, chairman of the transportation committee, proposes a 33% cut to the Federal transportation budget. The 80-20 allocation to Highways vs. transit will remain. A bad deal for transit, but at least there will be some consolidation and best of all: less money for those damned highway expansions. Let's stir it up for the road rage. As the late Matt Simmons said, not every apex is a real peak. There is no limit to human misery and craziness. Government has to live within its means so don't complain about stewing in traffic jams and talk radio.

Personally, I'm struggling with how "crazy" interlaces with "dense" because We The People seem to have become more loopy and dysfunctional in our journey back to 3rd grade mental competency. If "crazy" means having systematic delusions, then we're definitely riding that train!

I'm blown away that the bridge is being built in China. So depressing.

Seriously, as the US exports less and less and empty shipping containers are repositioned on ships bound for Asia to be reloaded we become poorer as a nation.

I loaded thousands of empties as a stowage coordinator onto containerships in the Port of LA in 1986 and its been accelerating ever since. There is no balance in trade at all. This is terrifying to me.

In an article familiarizing foreign travelers to the US, a writer for the Australian based travel publishing house Lonely Planet asserted that racism was the underlying factor in the Social Security debate in the US. More specifically, the author claimed that the younger and less white segment of the US population was unhappy about generous social security payments to the older, largely white segment.

Race is the major fault line in the US. Older, white voters have been less supportive of Obama, so it is not surprising that he would be willing to cut back on social security in return for some agreed upon revenue enhancers from Republicans. The Republicans must be thrilled with Obama's running cover for their dismantling of Social Security.

Obama and the Clinton's are not liberal democrats. They are about where Reagan was. And interior secretary Salazar is making James Watt look like a liberal. I know this because I am a 71 year old Republican. However most Republicans today are whacko religious nut jobs dancing to the corporate tune. It's just a matter of time before Monsanto decides to make anyone eligible for Social Security, tomorrow’s meal of Soylent Green.

Its beginning to feel like the decline of the Roman Empire. We're stuck with the sorry political hacks the oligarchs prop up. I really thought it would be impossible for any president to be worse than Bush 43, but it looks like its gonna happen right out of the gate.

It seems a correlation can be made easily between poverty and obesity. Poverty correlates with most things afflicting our population; lower educational attainment, obesity, violence, etc. It is an interesting phenomena that in the U.S. those with the least discretionary income contribute the most to high rates of obesity in our nation...how many billions of Big Mac's have been sold? Now McDonald's is available in Walmart.

My mother is in her 70's and a life long Democrat. She claims Republicans are not much different today than they were in the past. I disagree. Many of them display mean spirited behavior I do not recall years ago.

The problem with belief is less the fact that we all believe things. We do! The problem is the absolutism of those beliefs. If your beliefs don't account for different contexts, you can easily slip into inflexible adherence to "principles".

Meanness is really just the inability to admit the possibility of honest difference.

PSF: you correctly cite the correlation between poverty and obesity . . and I am curious about whether it also ties into our retreat to a 3rd grader's mental acuity. At the risk of being intolerant and/or unkind, there seems to be a pattern here. How 'bout the blowzy blond with the pneumatic chest who married the old dude and became a national side-show? Seems that we've become adept at majoring in minor matters and ignoring the locomotive's headlight moving closer with each tick of the clock!

I seriously doubt I coined "peak crazy". I do remember typing it and saying, Ah-ha! But one thing I don't doubt: You filled the term with piping hot oxygenated blood.

If one does a google search and gets rid of all the references to Crazy Peak in Montana, then we can see you pretty much own the phrase now. And that's is as it should be. That was a grand-nifty post. The phrase couldn't possibly have had a more rowdy or rogue-ier birth...

One more thing....

I don't totally agree with your assessment of NASA: "Now, nothing." A stunning animated video of the Mars Science Laboratory going up late Nov. early Dec, shows we can still attempt great things. The landing will blow your mind. Holy Sweet Christ, but that is complicated!

But I do agree in general....

If I was president I'd have a one-way manned mission to Mars with older American adults on its way before 2020. It's that vision thing. It matters. The spirt of a people shall not be constrained by gravity. How many Americans 60 and over do you think would volunteer to be the first colonizers of Mars? To live there, get resupplied, and die there? To grab the beachhead for the next Americans? Thousands if not millions. But we no longer have leaders capable of raising the bar equal to our expectations....

American Crazy-The belief that we can soil our nest without consequences; we can damage or destroy our fellow citizens without consequences; we can be as dumb as we want to be without consequences; our neighbors will watch us become unreasonably wealthy without consequences; workers can be disregarded as customers and consumers without consequences; you can allow corporations who have only one purpose,to have all the same rights as citizens and not have consequences; and finally, please feel free to add to this list.

AWinter, I get an earful of Canadian politics from my sister who lives in Vancouver. There's a welcome contrast to the US - Gay marriage! Universal health care! Not as many fundamentalists! On the other hand, there's that part of human nature that is apparently dominant even when there's no Rush Limbaugh whispering seductive poison into Canadian ears. You can see in the clear cutting of British Columbia forests, the tar sands devastation of Alberta, and the exhausted fisheries of the Grank Banks. Canada is hungry and greed is ubiquitous.

It's a disturbing thought: if Blue America were its own country, it would be a lot like Canada. And we would manifest our own Stephen Harper because as virtuous as we think we are, we're still grasping, grubby creatures.

Let me recommend the works of Maude Barlow if you're not familiar with her. Too Close for Comfort is an eye-opener for explicating the economic and political relationship between Canada and the US.